The call for tenders has been won by the three companies
Intevation (project lead, quality assuarance, tests),
Klarälvdalens Datakonsult
(KMail and other KDE conponents) and
g10 Code (all crypto components
and the technical concept).
With project start in October 2001, Ägypten was offically and successfully
finished in Novermber 2002.
The project management team consisted of two persons, the lead was with
Bernhard Reiter and he was backed by Jan-Oliver Wagner.
The development team counted 6 heads.

Encryption of great importance for government and economy

The technical framework of Sphinx is based on the specification S/MIME
and involves the assignment and accreditation of certificates for
digital transactions such as E-Mail.
To build such national infrastructures it is a pre-condition
to provide all participants with tools to read and verify
other people's E-Mails.

The KMail version with the new crypto components has
proven good interoperability with proprietary systems during
official tests performed by SchlumbergerSema.

All developments went upstream into main developments

The concept for the cryptography implementation was based on
a component oriented approach to ensure high flexibility and verifiability.

The cryptographic components have been incorporated into the well
known crypto-application GnuPG with extending the OpenPGP support by
S/MIME support and various small tools.
All elements are adopted for the main development and eventually
are automatically available to everyone who installs and uses GnuPG.

Also, the numerous extensions and improvements to KMail
have been adopted are already included and therwith
generally available since KDE release 3.1.
Not at least this was made possible through extensive cooperation with
the corresponding KDE developers.

The upstream integration into the main developments represents a
major success of the project.